The Janson Option

by Paul Garrison

  Had Gutaale arranged for pirates to hijack Tarantula in the first place for the purpose of seeking leverage over him and ASC? That seemed too twisted even for Somalia. But wasn’t that how Paul Janson saw it? Wasn’t that what Janson had come to tell him?

  Kingsman Helms took a deep, steadying breath. He lived by three mantras. Do Your Homework was the first; the spoils went to the deserving and the deserving were those who have always forged to the head of the class starting with getting into the right preschool. His second rule was his lens on the competition. The World Is Run by Fools; if you did your homework, you stayed ahead of the fools. The third was Accept Bad News; absorb it thoroughly, act quickly, don’t wait.

  And when you survived toiling under the Buddha, which would kill ordinary people, you learned to be decisive.

  He said, “I hope we can conclude our arrangements after my next meeting with President Adam.”

  Gutaale pretended nonchalance. “Ah. You are meeting with Raage? His nickname means—”

  “I know what his nickname means,” Helms interrupted. ‘He who delayed at birth.’ It seems to have given him a deeper perspective than most I’ve met in Somalia. I’m not surprised that people believe he’s the politician to restore your country.”

  “When is this meeting?”

  “Within the hour.”

  “My people will escort you. For your safety.”

  “The president is sending an escort, thank you.”

  Helms went back inside and telephoned his contact at the palace, the president’s chief of staff. “I’ve just concluded a conference call with my colleagues in Houston. I believe that President Adam would be interested in hearing what we discussed.”

  Within the hour of telephoning the palace, he was walking down the beautiful beach, led and trailed by armed men from the presidential guard who kept a respectful distance.

  So the world was even more perverted than he had imagined. The Buddha was beating him up. ASC division presidents were fighting like rats in a too-small cage. Gutaale had him by the short hairs. But didn’t the old rules still apply? Do your homework. Use the fools. Deal with bad news.

  He stopped walking. The bodyguards stopped, waiting for his next move. He was on the edge of something momentous, but he could not quite tell what.

  He walked.

  They walked.

  A figure walked toward them from far up the beach, distorted by the heat shimmering off the sand. Helms’s guards edged closer. As it neared, the figure took shape: solid, and moving with purpose.

  “It’s all right,” Helms told the captain of the guard. “I know the man.”

  Had Janson guessed he would go to the palace? Was he following him? Or tapping his phone somehow? Or, Helms wondered with a discomforting surge of panic, was he somehow predictable or transparent to a trained spy like Janson?

  * * *

  PAUL JANSON STOPPED two feet in front of Kingsman Helms and was pleased to see that he had spooked the businessman. He said, “Now that you know you were set up, the question is why?”

  “No. The question is, what am I going to do about it?”

  “I am glad to hear you say that,” said Janson.

  “How would you like a job?”

  “I already have a job: rescuing your wife.”

  “Yes, of course, but hopefully that won’t take forever and in the meantime there is another job that I suspect is up your alley—if something that Doug Case once hinted at in an indiscreet moment is true.”

  “I have no idea what Doug hinted.”

  Kingsman Helms looked around as much, Paul Janson thought, for dramatic effect as to ensure that the bodyguards would not hear over the sounds of the wind and the surf.

  “He hinted that you were a professional assassin.”

  “I could be equally silly and hint the same about Doug. We’ve neither of us made a secret of having once served our government. Today Doug is president of global security for ASC and I am president of the corporate security consultant Catspaw. We’ve both left the past so far behind that neither of us can remember it.”

  “I want to hire you to kill Home Boy Gutaale.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Beautiful, thought Janson. The helicopter had set Helms off even better than he had hoped. He took the oil executive’s arm and led him toward the water, farther from the guards.

  “Why would you want to kill Gutaale?”

  “For the same reason I hired you of all people to rescue Allegra. I hired you so I could run my deal in Somalia and not be manipulated. Gutaale has me by the short hairs. This helicopter stunt is a fucking demonstration that Allegra’s life is in his hands if I don’t do whatever he wants me to do. But it never occurred to me until now that he actually set it up.”

  “What would you do about Gutaale’s clans?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s their ticket to owning Somalia. They won’t take his murder lying down.”

  “They can be bought off,” said Helms.

  Janson nodded, conceding that it would be possible to bribe clansmen with face-saving blood money. “That would cost an enormous amount of money.”

  “Enormous amounts of money are at stake,” said Helms.

  “But the immediate chaos would not make it easier to rescue your wife.”

  “Do you counsel that we wait until after you rescue her?”

  “Killing Gutaale before would doom her.”

  Helms pondered that, then changed the subject. “Are you surprised by my request?”

  “No,” said Janson. “Not really.”

  “Why not? I’m a bit surprised myself.”

  “That’s because you just thought of it. But it fits with the other things you are thinking.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “If Gutaale is killed, there will be an opening in the warlord hierarchy.”

  “Not if the president moves quickly.”

  “Raage?”

  “Who else?” asked Helms.

  “You,” said Janson.

  “Me?”

  Janson said, “It’s crossing your mind. You’re thinking, If I have this country—if I owned it—I could have everything.”

  “I’m a businessman. I’m not looking to run a country.”

  “You’re an oilman. You’re used to running countries. But I’ll bet it’s dawning on you that running one directly would be better than getting pushed around by the Buddha and a gang of ASC division chiefs. ASC will come to you hat in hand. You’ll own the oil—You must have thought of this. Go-to man for an entire nation. Your own airport and airline. A seat in the United Nations. Feted at Davos.”

  “The Somalis will have plenty to say about who runs them,” Helms replied. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Raage is getting his act together.”

  “I’ve seen solid mercenaries training his army,” Janson agreed. “Maybe the president is the hope of the future. If it doesn’t get him killed. But you know what I’m saying. If Home Boy Gutaale was gone and something happened to the current president, the opening would be there.”

  Helms glanced out at the ocean. “Strange,” he said softly. “It’s like you’re in my head.”

  “I’m only telling you what I would do if I were in your position: take charge and run the place like a business, thereby improving everyone’s life, starting with your own. The Somalis are great entrepreneurs. Mogadishu could be the jewel of East Africa.”

  Helms nodded. “Could I count on you, Janson?”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into Doug’s indiscretion. But you’d find somebody to do it… Although, considering what’s at stake,” Paul Janson added with a thin smile, “the price of killing Gutaale has gone up.”

  “There will be plenty of money for all,” Helms assured him. “Think on it.”

  Paul Janson said, “My first job is to concentrate on freeing your wife.”

  He walked away, down the beach in the opposite direction Helms and the president’s guard were hea
ded. Jessica Kincaid had gotten it from the get-go: he was gunning for the American Synergy Corporation and he could not wait to tell her that he had them in his sights.

  “Isse! Look who’s here, Xalan, it’s Isse from America. How is your mother?”

  “She’s fine, Dr. Ibrahim. We just Skyped. She says to say hello and all her love.”

  “Come in. Come in. Xalan, he’s here. Young Isse.”

  Isse kept his smile big, hiding total defeat. By trying to buy information about where to find Mullah Amriki he had broadcast the information that he had money. The sharpers who hung around the Internet Café had not taken long to spot a rich kid from a dollar country.

  The light fell on his face, and Dr. Ibrahim exclaimed, “What happened to you?”

  “I got mugged.”

  “You poor child. Let me get my bag. We’ll have a look at that.” His wife, Xalan, had overheard and rushed in with her own medical bag. Soon the two of them were clucking over him at their kitchen table, querying while they cross-examined him about his mother and father. Were they in the same house? No, a bigger one. Did they travel? Hoping soon to visit Mogadishu. Wonderful. And what are you doing here, young man? Taking a little time off before applying to medical school. Of course. There! You’ll be all right. You must be hungry.

  After lamb and rice, mango juice, and flan dessert, Dr. Ibrahim sat back with a yawn. “You’ve come just in time. I’m so glad I didn’t miss you. I leave for Dinsoor in the morning.”

  Isse, on the edge of yawning, too, snapped awake. “Dinsoor?”

  Dinsoor was deep in territory still contested by al-Shabaab. The only man Isse had spoken to who hadn’t tried to rob him had told him that Mullah Amriki was hiding in the Dinsoor district.

  “AMISOM pushed al-Shabaab out of Dinsoor. We’re bringing in a mobile hospital to resume vaccinating.”

  Isse was almost overwhelmed. When all was lost, God had intervened.

  “I would like to come with you. To help.”

  “You are your mother and father’s child,” said Dr. Ibrahim. “Mugged, robbed, beaten, and all you think of is, Can I help? Of course you can help.”

  They showed him their shower-bath and gave him clean clothes and a bed in the room their son had vacated to go to school in Dubai. “God is good,” Isse said.

  “Of course he is,” Dr. Ibrahim replied with a nonbeliever’s smile. “But even if he weren’t, we would still be honored to repay your parents’ generosity.”

  Dr. Ibrahim’s Ministry of Health convoy of SUVs left Mogadishu at dawn guarded by AMISOM armored carriers. They arrived dusty and road-battered at midnight at a government enclave on the edge of Dinsoor, a district capital town with a population swelled by refugees to thirty thousand.

  Isse walked out of the camp at dawn. When soldiers stopped him at their checkpoints, he showed the Ministry of Health ID card Dr. Ibrahim had had issued to him. They let him pass, warning him to look out for al-Shabaab who had fled but would not flee far. The religionists would kidnap medical personnel and force them to tend their wounded.

  “I’m not a doctor,” said Isse.

  “They won’t believe you when they see that pass.”

  At each checkpoint, the soldiers’ warnings grew more strident. Isse thanked them for their concern and kept walking, farther and farther from the town.

  Al-Shabaab was closer than the soldiers thought. And a lot more invisible. One moment Isse was alone on a dusty road, the next three skinny kids were pointing AKs at his head. Ragged clothes, dirty faces, arms and legs like coat hangers. Isse felt every muscle in his face jump into a huge smile.

  “Mullah Abdullah al-Amriki?” he asked.

  They fingered the ID dangling from his neck.

  He realized they couldn’t read.

  “Abdullah al-Amriki,” he repeated.

  Suspicious stares.

  He had come prepared with a translation that kept the funky flow, and he rapped, in Somali, “Join the caravan before you lose your soul. Sell this life for endless happiness down the road.”

  “Thumper!” they chorused, pounding their chests like the rapping cleric, and high-fived Isse with grins as big as his.

  * * *

  ALLEGRA STARED THROUGH a bullet-starred window. The sky and the water were barely bright enough to glimpse the white surf tumbling onto the distant beach. But the hot sun would rise soon enough on a situation she knew was spinning out of control. The pirates were chewing khat day and night and it was making them crazy, bored, and violent.

  Adolfo’s gun seemed less of a godsend than a flimsy shield.

  How many could she shoot before they overwhelmed her? Maxammed could barely subdue them. Yesterday they suddenly began shouting that they wanted their share of the ransom. Where was it? they demanded. What was taking so long?

  Maxammed had actually thrown a man into the sea for refusing to stop shouting at him. Now the rest obeyed, but they were sullen, whispering among themselves as they chewed and spit the green leaves, staring wild-eyed and muttering threats.

  THIRTY

  1°19' S, 36°55' E

  Jomo Kenyatta International Airport

  Nairobi, Kenya

  Jessica Kincaid told herself that there were two kinds of reckless. Reckless where you risked your life like a dumb football clod—going too fast on a motorcycle without a helmet, for instance, or pulling a John Wayne in a firefight when you know damned well that the way to win a firefight, which was to not get killed, was to raise your head no higher than necessary to acquire your targets. That was the kind of reckless Janson was always warning her about.

  The other kind of reckless was when you risked your cover, which wasn’t usually a problem for her. She was intensely private and made a habit of stealth, always, so it was a very small shift of gears to go operational. So while she would happily go nuts on a Ducati sport bike, she never got reckless with cover.

  Problem was—except for a decent reading on the CT scan Janson had ordered her to get in Nairobi—she had nothing to show for her trip. She’d been hoping to make up for Ahmed and Isse bagging them. But none of the contacts the real estate guy Salah Hassan had set in Nairobi’s “Little Mogadishu” neighborhood of Somali expatriates had panned out, and she was heading back to Janson empty-handed.

  Then life intruded with a double whammy. Nairobi Airport locked down because of a drone crash. They claimed it was brush fire, but she had seen it from the corner of her eye. Someone’s secret military UAV had augered into a nearby sorghum field. That ate up an hour. Then the damned plane broke down and she had to wait while Lynn and Sarah and a passel of Kenyan mechanics figured out why an oil-pressure sensor had gone haywire.

  Stuck with time on her hands, she limped into the airport bar.

  Which brought Kincaid to the fit, intelligent-looking guy with his arm in a sling who was nursing a beer. To her eye, he had US Special Forces stamped on his forehead, making him a prime source of boots-on-the-ground information. But SF guys were trained to report nosy questions, so unless she did a superlative job of tamping down curiosity, Paul Janson would get a call from an old friend asking, not politely, “What are you doing on our turf?”

  Her first and best step was to get the SF guy to open the conversation, which was not too hard with a poor bastard who’d been in-country for a month and warned that Somali camel herders’ daughters, as beautiful as they were, were off-limits. She sat one stool over, ordered a beer, and they exchanged nods.

  “NGO?” he asked, meaning some nongovernmental agency like Doctors Without Borders. She looked the part, wearing khaki pants loose enough to conceal the bandage on her thigh, combat boots, a long-sleeved checked shirt, and a floppy canvas bush hat.

  “AID,” she answered, making herself more official. She was carrying United States Agency for International Development paperwork to back the lie. “You?”

  “Sleeping sickness eradication,” he lied back.

  “I thought that was mostly in West Africa.”

&n
bsp; “We’re making sure it stays there.”

  “How’d you cut loose from your group?”

  “Putting a buddy on his flight” was the cryptic answer. “Where you headed?”

  “Mog… you?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t sound thrilled.

  She said, “The place is a mess.”

  He said, “Makes in-country look like paradise.”

  This went on through two more beers.

  Kincaid decided she would have to be a lot more reckless if she was going to learn anything that would help spring Allegra Helms.

  “When’s your flight?” she asked.

  He looked at his watch. “Fourteen hundred… Yours?”

  “I don’t know. They’re swapping out some damned thing.”

  “What line? The Turks?”

  “Private.”

  He looked at her.

  She said, “I lied. I’m not AID.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “Meant to.”

  “Who you with?”

  “Corporate security.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Corporate security in Mog? Now you’re really lying.”

  “We’re trying to spring a lady who got kidnapped.”

  “Oh.”

  They sat silently sipping beer for a few minutes. Then he asked, “How you making out?”

  “Lousy.”

  He asked, “What are you, like, a ransom negotiator or something?”

  “Or something.”

  “That where you got your limp?” he asked.

  “Slipped in the shower.”

  He patted his sling. “Me too.”

  Kincaid glanced at him. Far from tamping down curiosity, she saw questions blooming like daisies on his face. But before she got too reckless she had to get something back from him. She asked, “Who are you chasing?”